Is Steam becoming a Rip-Off?

[Zulu1966]

Well to me - from a steam point of view - its all about income generation.
I think they are filling their inventory with everything they can to keep the cash flowing in.
I mean how many AAA games have release in the last six months ?

[FarAway Sooner]

I think one nuance of the original post is kinda interesting.  How aggressively does Steam filter their product selection based on how much money they're receiving?  If popular, highly promising, seeming quality games in late development struggle for Greenlighting, while other crap Alpha titles walk in the front door without a Greenlight vote, that would indicate that Steam might be more interested in pocketing your money than delivering good value for the money you pay them.

Buyers should always beware, but that doesn't mean that you can't prefer vendors who have an established practice of trying to do right by their customers (e.g., the way Stardock did with Fallen Enchantress).  I have no idea how Steam decides those things, and they have a right to try maximizing their short-term revenue if they want to, but I also have a right to channel my business towards vendors who are more committed to maximizing their long-term revenue by offering quality products.

It's just something to keep an eye on as you evaluate what you buy and from whom, I think...

[RooksBailey]

It seems Steam is selling more and more so called early releases, some of which aren't even at the Beta stage, with some selling for new full release prices.

I also find it odd, games like Panzer Corp can't get greenlighted but, Rip-off crap like Day One: Garry's Incident can. It seems if some one gives away enough Steam keys anything can get greenlighted. Is the greenlight open to manipulation or is the process fixed?

Steam is still a great way to get and manage games and there is nothing easier than getting your steam games installed on a new rig. Yet the whole Early Release and Greenlight process is starting to smell and it's not good!

I think the problem is that the gaming industry is contracting year after year.  Steam has to fill their "shelves" with something, so I think they are doing it by "greenlighting" alphas and betas. 

It is really sad when you look at the games on Steam these days: it is like the 90s all over again with tons of side scrollers and platformers.  Not that in and of itself that is a bad thing, but it certainly shows how gaming is stuck in neutral and/or going backwards.

Edit: I just saw Zulu1966's comment.  Spot on.  +1

[Huw the Poo]

I have no idea how Steam decides those things, and they have a right to try maximizing their short-term revenue if they want to, but I also have a right to channel my business towards vendors who are more committed to maximizing their long-term revenue by offering quality products.

Maximising revenue short-term is what Valve has always been about.  That's why their customer support is so shit.

[ArizonaTank]

If Steam tells us what we are buying...then there is really no issue for me either.

But I do wonder about how the PC game market has changed.  It wasn't long ago when a buggy, incomplete release from a low budget indie developer brought a very harsh reaction.  I remember folks calling the Histwar release a criminal act for example: the side-story of course was that the dev stuck around and supported his product for years after release.

Now developers just sell whatever they have in their source safe as an "alpha" or "beta" release, and everybody is happy.

I also wonder what this will do to the dev business itself.  Having worked in a software company myself, there was nothing like a payday at the end to keep the project on track.  Under today's rules I guess that that pressure to complete the project is gone or at least lessened.  What is the incentive to ever get out of beta?

[Arctic Blast]

I don't see any issues with the offering of Alpha and Beta games.  It does seem to be more of a trend, paying for "early access" to incomplete games.  However, this is clearly advertised and I don't have any problem in principle of offering folks the opportunity to pay to play early, eg. ARMA 3.  As a consumer, it pays to do your due diligence before you buy to determine if a game is worth an early pay-to-play and there is so much information out there that there's no reason to feel misled into buying a clunker.  For example, there is almost no game on Steam's forums that doesn't have a "Is this game worth it?" thread on the first page, and since the Steam forums almost always attract folks with an axe to grind, getting access to negative opinions has never been easier.

I don't have any opinion as to Greenlight or how it works.

Pretty much agree with the entire paragraph.

As for Greenlight, games getting through is based on user votes and wants. So if something crap made it through, blame the voters.

[Steelgrave]

Yeah, recently I've purchased 7 Days to Die and Legends of Eisenwald on Steam, both Alpha's. I'm playing the hell out of 7 Days and think Eisenwald is a dog. This can happen with any game, Alpha or not. I'll take the chance if the price is right and I'm intrigued, but there's not a lot of Alpha's I can say that about.

[ComradeP]

It might still be preferable to pay for an alpha compared to contributing to Kickstarter for a game that may or may not actually be worth something when it's released. At least you get to play something. Sure, you roll the dice a bit, but you can often at least get some sort of informed opinion on whether it's going to be terrible or not (there's always a sucker before you who bought the poor quality game you're looking at, and in this era he'll post about it somewhere).

The trend towards less patience/greater simplification has been going on for years, people want content now and don't want to wait a while. As a sales strategy, it clearly seems to work for some people. There are so many indie developers around that the competition for attention (not for the quality of the release, purely for the attention) of the customer must be pretty fierce, so they will try to release something that could be described as being partially playable as soon as possible.

Maybe the reason that there's no outcry over this is because they're not AAA titles. It's a paradox of sorts, but that does seem to be how the market works: people expect quality from AAA titles, even though I'm pretty sure in-house beta's of CoD games are more stable than some of the alpha releases on Steam, it just won't do if those are released. On the other hand, indie games are slowly moving towards premium prices, which makes the business practice a bit more debatable. Game prices have increased notably in recent years in any case (don't refer to how AAA games were cheap before compared to their rising development costs, I know that story, I'm talking about all these indie games with minimal development costs). Something that you would expect to pick up for your phone for less than 10 bucks can cost you 30 on Steam.

I guess that's also why I don't play nearly as many mainstream titles as before: there are a lot more releases per month of some sort now than there were before the digital download and indie era, but most of them only seem to offer a limited amount of content and may or may not be all that different from their competitors. It's fast-paced high adrenaline gaming in many cases, something I'm not a big fan of, and sadly that's par for the course in the gaming market today, so I buy mostly older games or wargames.  In a way, buying a game that gives you a few hours of content could be considered being ripped off, but opinions clearly differ. I guess the tipping point for me was Dragon Age: Origins, which was more simplified than I had hoped it would be, after that the streamlining/simplification/instant gratification craze ruined a lot of games for me. Even something like Rome 2 is streamlined and simplified compared to its predecessors according to reviews, yet for reasons not entirely clear to me many fans of the original series still like it. For me, it would be too difficult to adapt.

[Cyrano]

I believe it was the reboot of "Pool of Radiance" that not only was buggy as blazes at release, but included as an uninstall "feature" the zerging of some users' system registries causing hard crashes.  People were charged full price for which they received a lovely paper map, game media, a printed user manual, and, eventually, a borked computer.  The emptor has always had to caveat.

As PC gaming becomes more and more niche, I can foresee a world in which only console games get beta teams.

Best,

Jim
"Cyrano"
:/7)

[MengJiao]

Even something like Rome 2 is streamlined and simplified compared to its predecessors according to reviews, yet for reasons not entirely clear to me many fans of the original series still like it. For me, it would be too difficult to adapt.

  The reviews of Rome are pretty confusing and so completely distant from the actual game that you need sophisticated diagnostic methods to figure out why people seem to have reviewed the game without coming to grips with what game is.  First of all, there's nothing simplified about the game; the apparent simplicity is the result of the game working so well that everything feels completely natural: stuff happens, years pass, armies and fleets move (note that Rome I had no tactical sea battles at all and Rome II does and the sea battles in Rome II work so well that no one has anything to say about them -- they work fine therefore they are invisible to reviewers) battles are fought etc.  Most of the game works so well that it enters a kind of uncanny valley in which whatever works appears natural and therefore not gamey and therefore not visible to reviewers.  Many fans of the Original like Rome II because it is a game that has improved so much and works so well and has so much more depth than the original that most everything about the game that works (and that is most of the game) is perceived as "simplified" (ie actually functional) by people who haven't engaged with the game.

  This inability of reviewers to come to grips with good games is a symptom of what is happening to games: they are spliting not just into niches but into completely different modes of perception -- reviewers who do nothing but catalog the usual bugs and what not and fail to note that the graphics are not just excellent but actually tell you what is going on show that a lot of things about games are simply becoming hard to see because they are deceptively familar and another set of steps is needed to see what is there in what there is to be seen, ie, there are games where you have to play the game quite a bit to see what the dynamics really are and how well all the components come together.  This is relatively easy for some types of games where the focus of the game is on something limited like sports or platforms or killing zombies or racing cars, but not so easy for games offering a lot of complex options in a complex version of the ancient world.

[Greybriar]

I believe it was the reboot of "Pool of Radiance" that not only was buggy as blazes at release, but included as an uninstall "feature" the zerging of some users' system registries causing hard crashes.  People were charged full price for which they received a lovely paper map, game media, a printed user manual, and, eventually, a borked computer.  The emptor has always had to caveat.

As PC gaming becomes more and more niche, I can foresee a world in which only console games get beta teams.

Best,

Jim
"Cyrano"
:/7)

Yes, it was Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor that was released with the "buggy" (to use the term loosely) uninstall feature. The way I understand it, if someone uninstalled the unpatched version of the game, it would wipe the computer's system files.

[Nefaro]

As PC gaming becomes more and more niche, I can foresee a world in which only console games get beta teams.

PC Gaming is surviving just fine.  I'd even say it's thriving due to the bustling indie market of late.

I dunno why some of you guys keep insisting that it's dying.  Same 'ole misconceptions we've seen for decades.  ::)


I owned POR:RoMD and never had an uninstall issue with it back in the day.  I actually got some enjoyment out of it, despite the odd bug.  Of course Neverwinter Nights came along a little time afterwards and blew it away in all categories.

[HistoricalGamer]

Thats not true at all. The gaming industry is continuing to expand dramatically so year after year. There is a pretty big shift or at least a disturbance in the market where Mobile Games are growing far more rapidly than anyone else but the market isn't shrinking, it's growing, and so is revenue. The reason many developers are struggling is because as the slice of the pie has grown so too have the number of developers. Further while industry revenue's are increasing costs for developing software are dramatically increasing as well, at the high end costs are often outstripping realistic sales figures. Tomb Raider broke all sorts of sales records and yet still wasn't enough of a success for it's developer to consider it a success they had wholly unrealistic expectations due to dramatic cost overruns of it and other games they have been developing.

The increase in "retro" or platform games is more of a indie trend because a few companies have done very very well with it and others are trying to replicate their success. Companies are not developing games like that because they have to but rather because it seems to the smaller companies that's where the chance of success is. Lower costs for developing older style games while higher than average revenues means tons of companies are flooding that part of the market at an unsustainable high mark, its a fad in other-words. Retro gaming is in and a small development team is more likely to try their hand at that than something more expensive. Lower risk higher reward. At least that's their assumption.

It seems Steam is selling more and more so called early releases, some of which aren't even at the Beta stage, with some selling for new full release prices.

I also find it odd, games like Panzer Corp can't get greenlighted but, Rip-off crap like Day One: Garry's Incident can. It seems if some one gives away enough Steam keys anything can get greenlighted. Is the greenlight open to manipulation or is the process fixed?

Steam is still a great way to get and manage games and there is nothing easier than getting your steam games installed on a new rig. Yet the whole Early Release and Greenlight process is starting to smell and it's not good!

I think the problem is that the gaming industry is contracting year after year.  Steam has to fill their "shelves" with something, so I think they are doing it by "greenlighting" alphas and betas. 

It is really sad when you look at the games on Steam these days: it is like the 90s all over again with tons of side scrollers and platformers.  Not that in and of itself that is a bad thing, but it certainly shows how gaming is stuck in neutral and/or going backwards.

Edit: I just saw Zulu1966's comment.  Spot on.  +1

[ArizonaTank]

PC Gaming is surviving just fine.  I'd even say it's thriving due to the bustling indie market of late.

I dunno why some of you guys keep insisting that it's dying.  Same 'ole misconceptions we've seen for decades.  ::)

I don't want to derail this thread, but would jump into the discussion with gusto in another thread.  I think PC gaming as we know it is having it's last "hurrah." 

[MengJiao]

PC Gaming is surviving just fine.  I'd even say it's thriving due to the bustling indie market of late.

I dunno why some of you guys keep insisting that it's dying.  Same 'ole misconceptions we've seen for decades.  ::)

I don't want to derail this thread, but would jump into the discussion with gusto in another thread.  I think PC gaming as we know it is having it's last "hurrah."

  It's quite possible that there will be a new model for what used to be the AAA games.  For example, you would buy into the gaming system at some stage and then buy into expansions and so on (sort of sounds like things are now), but for at least twice as much money.

   Other games might go more the way of user-created content., so you might buy in, buy the editor and get some financial return for your work.   So the AAA titles would essentially just start to cost a lot more and the other types would become something like the ARMAs -- but again for more money -- you would buy the editor and hope to make back some of your outlay by selling your scenarios.

   Another model could be one that is less locked into a particular game and more a matter of collaborative work on an evolving game.  You would pay to work on the game.  Sounds bad, but it might be interesting.